All told, telehealth abortion websites had more than a 25-fold increase in traffic, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb. The dramatic increase highlights a post-Roe nation where patients seeking abortions in states that ban the procedure are beset by logistical hassles and worries about legal consequences at a time when many doctors are trying to adjust to the new terrain.
“People’s main option is going to be either finding a way to travel out of state or being able to self manage,” said Abigail Aiken, an associate professor of public affairs who focuses on abortion at the University of Texas at Austin. “The discrepancy that we already lived with — in terms of access to abortion and in particular medication abortion being so zip code dependent — is really just getting more and more stark.”
In some cases, those patients are traveling hundreds of miles to states that permit abortion. They are setting up forwarding addresses to receive abortion medications, or finding mobile clinics staffed with traveling doctors.
“We have people just going right over the border into New Mexico from Texas and parking there for their virtual visit and waiting for the medication to be mailed to them,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Women’s Health, which is in the process of shutting down its Texas abortion clinics, where abortion is now banned, and setting up one in a New Mexico border city.
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